blackfoot-valley

After heroic efforts, nearly all of the hopeful newcomers went broke at about the same time and sold out at a loss to cattlemen, their dreams shat- tered. Much of the land reverted to bunch grass and brush. The valley’s glory days in farming were over. Cattle raising once more became king in the valley and has remained so ever since. In Tom Geary’s words, “The bunch grass grew so high you could shine your shoes on it.” The agricultural crash, of course, was not confined to the Nevada Val- ley, but as outlined earlier, was part of a much broader pattern that devas- tated overfarmed eastern Montana and the rest of the Great Plains, which had drawn migrants mostly from the east. In a diabolical twist, the rapidly lessening European demand for grain and the resulting crash in grain prices at the end of World War I, compounded the disaster; but in any case, when dry years set in the crop failures would have taken place regardless. During this period, the “Big House” on the Wales Ranch was built, as was the one-room Wales Creek school about a mile north of it. Eddy Wales mentioned to me that “before his time” the ranch management hired a Japa- nese man to singlehandedly dig a two-mile ditch to bring water across the “desert” to the Wales Creek schoolhouse. Parts of it are plainly visible. What is left of the section he showed me, still readily apparent, is three feet or so in width, running through the pleasant grove of woods where he was then living in his mobile home a bit north of Yourname Creek. The “old-time” daily life in the valley spanned the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, although many as- pects of it continued into the 1920s and even the thirties. Helmville residents amounted to an exceptionally close-knit “family,” and so they remain today. Many of its people, indeed, are related to one another. Although this is less true today than before, Patricia Geary wryly comments that the Helmville peo- ple “have been referred to as a ‘species’ by one scientist.” The Geary, Wales, Coughlin, Raymond, and other families are all intricately intertwined. They provide, now as formerly, many of their own amusements: picnics, camping, fishing, dances thrown at every marriage or any other excuse (they still have old-fashioned accordian dances), basketball and baseball games, ice skating. The traditonal community baseball contest is still held in Helmville on the Fourth of July. (When I attended, the opposing teams were men vs. women, of all ages from first-graders to retirees, with Pat umpiring. The women won!) Also a two-day rodeo is still held on Labor Day weekend at the grand- stand located between town and the Ranch. A community 4-H party is held on Halloween, when kids numbering three dozen or so come in their cos- 146